My

Anti-Cull Philosophy

A Crow Calling

Yesterday I felt fury, after reading reports regarding government plans to extend
the culling of badgers on this island in the North Sea, for several years. I felt a
hateful rage, which embodies a far less likeable aspect of my personality than
those aspects most people would likely wish to encounter.

After having been involved in anti-cull rebellion since 2015 and living in North
Devon, frequently seeing dead badgers by the side of the road, I have come to
experience a deep personal sense of care for these beautiful creatures. Finding a
sett with healthy looking entry points brings an experience of joy to me, which
would undoubtedly be considered bizarre to most members of this culture. I
experienced this joy yesterday when I visited the sett that I was regularly
checking during the 2020 cull season and will be checking regularly this year too.
It is a huge sett and had all the signs of being active with badger life coming in
and out, living as they do, despite the pesticidal, specicidal machinery attempting
to negate their living presence. I do not mind sharing here that I did a small
dance at the sight of these stunningly gorgeous holes in the ground – probably
looking utterly ridiculous to the birds, squirrels and trees who shared the space
with me in that moment. When I got back to my house my wife asked me how the
sett was looking and I was so pleased to tell her, going on to say that I am
probably going to write something about the cull (again).

This morning I saw more reports on the government plans to extend the cull for
several years – possibly even longer than I had read yesterday. I was hit with a
deep feeling of sadness and an experience of despair that hit me in the centre of
my chest, sitting there like a crow calling out so often as to render forgetting its
presence impossible.

I had in mind other activities to engage in today, but the crow’s calling persisted
in my chest, leaving me with the awareness that a primal and immediate aspect
of my Being was communicating to my conscious awareness that now another
activity was more desirable. Listening to this visceral, instinctual voice within my
body, I decided that I would put off those other activities and begin writing this
piece.

The most difficult part of writing anything for me is the space that comes before
the writing of the first sentence. There is an intense cosmological quality to
starting to write something for me, which is frankly absurd and stupid, but is
undeniably the truth of my experience. Because it is an absurd activity, as I know
that writing this is not going to stop cull-culture or save badgers from mass-
extinction-machinery, but yet I feel this intense experience of existential
responsibility regarding whether or not a choose to write about this matter and
how I write about it. I have decided though that I will embrace the absurdity of
the act and write about badgers and the cull, but how now to do it? Do I write an
inspirational call to action, reminiscent of revolutionary rhetoric? Perhaps I will
attempt to write a very logical assessment of why the cull makes no rational
sense, with a moral case against the practice, detailing aspects of animal cruelty?
Maybe I will write an open letter to my MP and publish it in the hopes that it
might encourage others to do so, possibly motivating the politician to appeal in
parliament for the end of the culling? I mean, fucking hell, how do I go about
putting the caw of this crow and the beauty of those holes in the earth, into
words for someone to read and maybe decide to rebel against cull-culture?

The words “quit over rationalising this you daft tit” come into my head and I
decide to write this as I have been doing so – as a personal, raw, individualistic
account of my experience on the matter. I find beauty in what has been described
as uncivilised writing [1] and feel happy with this approach to describe the crows
calling.

Tomorrow writing this piece will be less of a struggle, as the great cosmological
event of “beginning” has occurred. There will be less anxious, confused moving
from one direction to another and more moving from space to space, that will be
more akin to shinrin yoku praxis.

I will leave this here today with one story of my experiences in cull resistance
that I feel to share here. In my second year involved in anti-cull rebellion, when
out with a hunt sab group, we were walking across a field at night, after having
checked the woods at the far side from where we had parked. We were aware of
badgers playing a short distance away from us in the field, but were unaware of
the shooters behind us, who must have snuck in while we checking the woods. I
felt the bullet go past the left side of my torso, as it displaced the air between it
and me. Moments later, we felt the badger die in our arms, as we desperately
attempted to bring them to the car alive, to take them to a wildlife hospital. It
was this experience, more than any other, than confirmed to me the intensity to
which this culture is waging a violent campaign upon wildlife, akin to other
militarist efforts in cultural-extermination. My awareness of this remains today
and I remain on the side of wildlife. I will speak about “tomorrow” tomorrow …

Respect Existence or Expect Resistance

Yesterday I decided that this section would be titled as it is and took
opportunities to reflect on those words. “Respect existence or expect resistance”
is a phrase I have come across often in anti-cull media and is probably my
favourite radical-slogan – or is equal to the line “death to Gilgamesh”, which I
was informed is, or was, a popular statement amongst Rojavan anarchists, the
YPG and YPJ. I’m not generally a fan of sloganing and find that it often cheapens
and weakens the communication of statements that I find valuable. An example
of this would be the Situationist line of “be realistic, demand the impossible”,
which I’ve seen to my horror being used in electoralist party propaganda. It
strikes me as utterly tragic to encounter this 5 word poem, created out of anti-
Spectacle desires, to be Spectacularised into the theatre of parliamentary musical
chairs. It seems to me though that those who are most responsible for this
situation are those radicals who sloganized this statement of surrealist rebellion
to the intensity that it has been. But moving back to the subject of “respect
existence or expect resistance”, as far as slogans go, I am quite fond of this one.

“Yeah yeah, okay Julian, we get it – you like the punchy word collection. But, so
what?” Okay, yes, I will go into the phrase further, but first I am going to clarify
two factors regarding what it is I am stating he. First of all, due to the egoism I
am bringing to this writing, I am not seeking to morally justify this statement and
encounter nothing that requires me to provide any justification than is greater
than my experience of desire. After this, due to the absurdism I am also bringing
to this writing, I shall not seek to provide anything more than reasoning that is
absurd reasoning [2] as unreasonable reasoning, accepting the limits of this
attempt to articulate any reason behind these words or reason for valuing them.
You might read these stipulations and decide to disregard what comes next,
favouring writings that attempt to hide the writer’s subjective-individuality and
the absurdity of their attempts at reasoning – that is, of course, your choice.

Moving on now.

Respect. Respect is one of those words that is used in so many different ways,
meaning many different experiences, that your use of the word might be totally
the reverse of mine. As I encounter the notion of respect though, I notice how
there are two immediate qualities to it: how I experience an-other and how I
treat them. To respect this other individual before me I first experience the
sensation of being affected by them with the feeling of respect – I encounter their
presence as a being who affects me with the affirming feeling of respecting-them,
which is generally quite a pleasurable experience, with the sense of positive-
relationship it brings. How I treat them, following this experience of positive
affirmation, manifests out of a desire to care for them, as a presence that I
encounter as valuable enough to care for. (It is hopefully apparent that this
description of respect in no way pertains to the authoritarian narratives
regarding “respect” that are so often drilled into the ideological rhetoric of this
culture!) Towards those badgers who the cull-advocates are seeking the
annihilation of, my experience of respect for their presence as an-other, who I
encounter as desirable, inspires me to seek to care for them, as best I can.

Existence. Not wanting to go too deeply into the matter of existence and what
that means here, I would encourage any individual reading this to read my piece
regarding Gorgias’ Trilemma and my reversal of his position to state as an
affirmation that “nothingness exists”, “nothing exists”, “no-Thing exists”,
“existence is nothing”, “existence is no-Thing” and “existence is nothingness” [3].
(Assuming that this has been read, or my meaning here is understood, I will
continue.) How this pertains to the affirmation of badgers as existing as being
nothing/no-Thing/nothingness is to affirm their lived presence as not
conforming to the dictates of this culture’s Thing-Reality, which does not really
exist. The point here is that they are living beings, not objects for the purpose of
this culture’s Man-ipulation (of which there really are none).

Expect. The meaning of the word “expect” here, certainly in my eyes, is one of a
threat, which holds the statement together beautifully. It positions the force of an
active will as a being lurking in the darkness of expectation. The expectation is
not an imaginary future though – some kind of utopian salvation. The
expectation is a hear and now lived experience of a psychologically immediate
presence, intended to bring to the attention of cull-ideologues the presence of
this being in the dark, prepared to enact this threat.

Resistance. Resistance is the actualisation of the threat that was positioned in
“expect”. But what does resistance mean? Well, to groups like the Jensenite
organisation Deep Green Resistance, “resistance” means “organised political
resistance”, generally positioned as a solution to a problem – a very optimistic
notion. For myself, this is not what resistance means, largely due to my doubts
regarding political organisations and my corresponding awareness of how this
notion of resistance both requires the “problem”, so that they can be “solution”,
and actually, generally, supports the “problem” more than challenges – an
example of this being how trade unions now, for the most part, support capitalist
infrastructure, by making it more comfortable for “workers”, so as to neutralise
any potential challenge to capitalism, rather than actually challenging capitalism.
As I encounter resistance in this statement I encounter it as a position of refusing
to conform to the ideology of cull-culture and a refusal to tolerate it. The
intolerant destruction of cull-ideology is the positive affirmation of the living
presence of badgers – feral iconoclasm [4], as I wrote about in my book with that
title.

So the statement “respect existence or expect resistance” means to me this –
positively affirm the living presence, through care, of the living beings called
badgers, who are not Things, or expect to experience iconoclastic-destructive
intolerance of a rebellion that refuses to embrace cull-ideology. Not wanting to
go too deep into the realms of differance, I am comfortable leaving this meaning
as it is.

200 Species A Day And Species-Being

As I approach writing this section an avoidant, weaker, part of my being is
tempted to put off starting this section to tomorrow. I wrote about tomorrow in
my piece Doomed To Deferral [5] stating –

“Ultimately, you and I will both be doomed, if we rest our hopes on reading or
writing tomorrow, but perhaps being doomed is a decent enough ending to start
at.”

and,

“Perhaps there is something to be said about being hopeless and fearless today.”

I am going to begin this section today, as I have done, and I have decided that I
will finish it another day. Cull rebellion happens between many sunsets and sun
rises, not as a History, with a future to achieve, but as a lived experience of being
cosmically tiny, immersed in an ever changing space, which too large to ever
fully comprehend.

But anyway, 200 species …

When I try to comprehend the scale of mass-extinction devastation I am struck
by the sheer horrific vastness of the situation. It is both immediately happening
where I am and a planetary event, far greater than the limits of my embodied
power to affect. The cosmic-pessimism that this brings would be dishonest to
deny, especially considering the will-to-life it took for living beings to overcome
previous mass-extinction events, with all the struggling and suffering that would
have involved. The intensity of the strength and power of those beings who lived
amidst those mass-extinction events is truly heroic to me, with all the tragedy
that real heroism involves, given their inevitable deaths, which fuelled the births
of other beings who also lived and struggled and suffered amidst mass-
extinction.

When I first encountered the statistic of 200 species going extinct a day I was
awestruck by the sheer magnitude of that scale of annihilation. To comprehend
this culture’s totalitarian practices as that colossal was, as they say, “mind
blowing”. And as I come to write about this here I am aware of my inability to
truly comprehend the entirety of this matter, feeling somewhat “mind blown”. So
I am going to move away from writing this for the moment, go into my garden
and sit with the wild flowers, bugs, birds and cats who generally share that space
with me. I have started this section today, as I decided I would, and now feel like
my energies are best put into experiencing other living beings who are also living
amidst mass extinction. I will come back to this tomorrow, or more likely the day
after (as I am aware that tomorrow is likely to be very busy and active, leaving
me unlikely to have the mental energy to write more here) …

…

The pause in writing this has been a few days. As I am writing, I am sat in my
living room, after just having eaten breakfast, with some ambient music playing,
the window open and allowing the sound of birds chirping to be heard over the
music, and it is a cloudy and chilly morning. Also, as I am writing this now, today,
the G7 event is happening in Cornwall, which is a relatively short drive from
where I live, with politicians and protesters having flooded to. Last night I
meditated on this political spectacle of Greenification and this morning I have sat
with a feeling of longing that, after G7, those who have travel through cull zones
will seek to challenge cull-practitioners, on their return journeys home. I will
share more about my meditations later in this piece though and return focus for
now on the subject of this section.

So, mass extinction. Fucking hell; how do I write about this here? To attempt to
write something on mass-extinction, through Mesodma, I engaged in speculative
palaeontological-realist fiction [6]. But I am not going to do that here. I could
attempt to explain the machinery/apparatus of mass-extinction culture, so that
someone reading might encounter new informational nuggets that enlighten
them to situation at hand – in the ways that many environmentally minded
individuals and groups try to do. But I don’t believe that that approach to writing
holds much value.

I tend to focus on encouraging individuals to turn their attentions to their
immediate, authentic, experience of living amidst mass-extinction
culture/machinery (civilisation/Leviathan as I would generally describe it), with
an affirmation of the primal life desire, will-to-life/power, that I notice in all
those I see embracing their being-alive. With this affirmation of individual,
egoistic, experience, I have affirmed a position of rejecting species-being
throughout much of my writing, which I will also do here – this coming from an
ontological perspective that fits a nominalist mode of thought, which I have also
named as eco-egoism (see my essay An Eco-Egoist Destruction of Species-Being
and Speciesism [7]). From this perspective an uncomfortable encounter hits me
and that is the prospect that every individual is actually an Endling, the last of
their kind and that every death is an extinction event. This does not neutralise
the devastation that is mass-extinction culture in any way – at least, not for me –
as it actually does the opposite, with every individual living being’s life being far
more intensely unique and rarefied and valuable, than any collectivised analysis
could pertain-to.

How does this relate to badgers and/or anti-cull philosophy and practices? Well
first of all, yes, I do talk and write about the species-collective called badgers,
mostly for easy(er) communication. But as I consider the abusive practices
enacted towards those living beings I might name as “badger”, my feeling of
horror, disgust and revolt is not lessened by the notions of “population numbers”
or “percentage being-culled”, as I feel intolerant towards the pesticidal abuse
enacted towards any of these individuals. Just because the numbers of those
named as Melee Melee (another name for badgers) are said to be generally
increasing, I do not encounter the life of any individual to be lesser for this, nor
their experience of desiring-life. Along with this, I am not attempting to “save the
species”, as I know that would be a ridiculous thing for me to attempt – akin to
trying to be a badger messiah, providing salvation for “the people”. Rather, I wish
to defend those individuals, who share living in this space that is local to me,
from cull-machinery. While I can speak to my disgust towards the cull in its
entirety, my anti-cull rebellion is localistic to the cull zone that I live in and
directed towards caring for individual setts fiercely, rather than the species in an
exhausted manner.

I know that it is not within my authentic power and responsability (ability-to-
respond) to save any species from mass-extinction culture. I do, however, have
the power, responsability and desire to care for individuals who I encounter in
my life as willing their primal-life desire as a rebellion in the face of Leviathan.

Helpful and Hopeless

With regards to the aforementioned meditation I had last night, one of the points
that came into my awareness regards 4 positions that I find as fair
generalisations for environmentalist psycho-philosophical “camps” – hopeless-
helpless, hopeful-helpless, hopeful-helpful and hopeless-helpful.

With regards to hopeless-helplessness, I do not feel entirely rejecting of the
position, but have no desire to embrace it for myself. I can sympathise with the
feelings of hopelessness and that the world is a very dark place to be, but
encounter the position of helplessness as basically pathetic and weak. The
individual who has no desire to help or are frozen by a lack of help in their life is
not one I encounter as beautiful, but I can affirm their honesty in the sense of
cosmic-pessimism.

The hopeful-helpful position is also one that I neither entirely affirm nor reject.
While I do not share their faith in political-narratives and/or green-technologies,
in any way, I find their willingness to care for wild living beings beautiful and
desirable. From my perspective, this it a naïve stance to take regarding hope, but
the beauty of the helpful activities are wonderful to encounter.

Hopeful-helplessness is to my eyes a position that is utterly grotesque and
revolting. To place faith entirely in the political-productive machinery of
Leviathan, whilst offering nothing of help or attempting to deny the
responsability that being a living-free-individual involves, is revolting to my
eyes. But sadly this appears to be the position pedalled most often – that we are
helpless and must place our hope in abusive apparatus.

This position that I affirm in its entirety and very much occupy is that of helpful-
hopelessness. To be without any feeling of hope, not believing that salvation is
coming, seems to me an honest position. I feel this and encounter a sense of
desire to help those who I experience care for. I encounter individuals who
occupy this position as intensely beautiful, for their strength, honesty and will.

I have no hope that the system will stop seeking to repress the lives of
individuals we name as badgers, but experience a desire to help those
individuals survive free from cull-machinery. It is not a comfortable place to be,
but it is where I am.

To Organise Or Not To Organise

It has been a week since I finished the last section. I’ve not written any more for
this, nor have I done any sett checks in the past week. In all honesty, as I type
this, I am pretty tired, after trying to do too much, recovering from my second
dose of covid-19 vaccine and having to sort out unexpected car problems. This
type of experience is very common to individuals who are engaged in activist
activities – feelings of being burnt out and needing to rest. And activism is the
focus of this section.

So, activism, what the fuck does activism mean – or, what does it mean to me
(and might do to you soon)? Well, that is a huge question really. I will start my
consideration of the question by considering how my “activism” differs from
(perhaps?) the definitions of other individuals who consider themselves
“activists”. Then I will describe what “activism” means for me, with specific
reference to my anti-cull activities.

My “activism” is not that of “organising” or “organisation” – though I do
appreciate the activities of organised hunt saboteur groups. In my experience,
the energies gone into “organising” and the “organisation” are often wasted life
potential, gone into constructing anthropological-machinery for the Cause,
rather than seeking to deconstruct and destroy abusive anthropological-
machines. Likewise, I am not interested in activism or activists as
experts(/authorities) or martyrs, as that typically has the smell of vanity-
missionary work, that is entirely about activists positioning themselves socially
as objects for worship – I’m thinking in particular here about the media driven
activities of the organisation Extinction Rebellion and its worshipers, as well as
the organisation Burning Pink (another project very much infected with Roger
Hallam’s vanity-missionary agenda). This form of “activism” revels in that most
tragic of successes, the small incremental improvement that satisfies the
appetites of those who were seeking to have their actions affirmed by state
and/or corporate infrastructure – ultimately supporting Leviathan’s abusive
practices, by making its violence more comfortable to live amidst so that
rebellion is less likely – or, if nothing else, press attention.

What activism means for me is care, expressed as an authentic, immediate,
affirmation of the presence of life. My desire to affirm the presence of living
badgers is actualised through my practice of defending setts without mediatory
organisations/groups, as an individual activity. This generally involves going to
visit setts and checking that they are free from abusive apparatus. But there are
other aspects of my anti-cull activist practice and to describe these I am drawing
from my thoughts on Massumi’s ideas on the principle of unrest (the book by the
same name is excellent reading on activism and ontology) [8]. The 3 concepts I
am going to focus on here are those of unrest, affectivity and capture. With
regards to unrest, I agree with Massumi that there is no such phenomenon or
thing as rest, and would affirm this with regards to self-care as an aspect of
activist unrest, as the processes of change occurring within my body. Rather than
self-care being, as many “revolutionaries” would position it, being a form of
passive liberal indulgence, (my) self-care affirms (my) living bodies (as my
individuality is a multiplicity of living bodies) as activist unrest, as I encounter
myself as Earth and the living world extending from my body – the attempt at
totalising rest(/death) being Leviathan itself. Taking the principle of unrest
seriously and considering Leviathan’s anthropological machinery as an attempt
at totalising rest(/death), it is impossible to not be an activist, as being alive is
unrest, with death being being-impossible – where activisms differ is in what
they are active in, i.e. the difference between ideological, political, work-placed
activisms and life affirming activisms. The second concept of affectivities enters
into my thoughts on my practice when I consider what is going to intensify my
ability to affect the well-being of badgers most significantly. So today, rather than
going to do sett checks, I have decided that I will self-care, through giving myself
space to recover, and write here, so that I might psychically affect other
individuals who read this. Affectivity in this sense is not attempting to Cause an
effect, as in determinism, but to effectively affect the world as an (absurd) act of
care. In much the same way that I am always at unrest, I am always affecting the
world, as I affect this chair I am sat on, I affect the air through my breathing, I am
affecting this piece through writing, I can affect other individuals through weird
conversations and breaking social conventions through everyday activities and
so on. The last concept I will comment on here is that of capture, which is very
much at the core of my rebellion – rebelling against the apparatus of capture
being at the core of many of the ideas in my book Feral Life. I am revolted – as
both disgusted by and inspired to revolt by – by the apparatuses of badger
capture and annihilation, with my desire for total liberation being my desire for
the destruction of the anthropological apparatuses of capture that is mass-
extinction machinery/culture. As such, my activism is foremost resistant
towards the structures of capture that constitute this culture’s Reality. I describe
this practice as being neither above-ground or under-ground, as I find that
dualism in (so called) activist praxis to be both unhelpful and bullshit – with
individuals like Max Wilbert who peddle that rhetoric succeeding only in
propagating organisational theatrics. How I describe my activist praxis is non-
localisable localism, which is easily differentiated from the localisable non-
localism of green ideologues who are concerned only with the easily locatable
matters of international green industries and politics, with no authentic
relationship to the space that they are here/now. Being non-localisable, the
practice is very difficult to find (if you’re not very close to me), but its intensely
local to where I choose to live – as I live in the middle of one of the cull zones and
actualise my rebellion here.

Now that I have finished this section, I feel that my activist praxis is best placed
in doing some dancing, cooking some dinner, bathing and then sleeping. I will
likely start the next section tomorrow, which I have been planning over the past
few days.

Conservationism? No - Preservationism!

In my book Feral Life, I wrote a meditation on conservationism as “jam jar”
politics and articulated my feeling of revolt towards the ideology. What I mean
by “jam jar” politics is simply the Man-ufacturing of a preserve, which is
reminiscent of making jams from fruits to keep the fruit longer for Humanised
consumption – rather than preserving the presence of the fruit outside of
anthropological systematisation by leaving it as it is where you encounter it in
the world, or eating it as you encounter it and doing something to care for the
space where you found it, which I put forward here as a mode of preservationism
(somewhat akin to Quinn’s notion of being-a-Leaver). The jam-jar preserves of
conservationism are intensely Man-aged and Man-ufactured spaces, with the
ideological focus being on preserving the flavours of what was once a living
space for future generations of Humans to “enjoy”, so that green-ideologues feel
less guilty about the industrial ecocidal and specicidal annihilation that this
culture enacts, almost everywhere at its current totalising state.

Recently two conservationist organisations have reminded me of how intensely I
dislike the ideology. The more recent of these instances is the Mammal Society
spreading speciesist rhetoric about racoon dogs as being a “non-native invasive
species” and a threat to the wildlife on this island on the North Sea. Calling any
living being invasive for migrating from where they live while trying to survive
amidst the totalitarian violence of Leviathan, whether they be Syrian refugees or
racoon dogs, is just ridiculous, especially as it is coming from an intensely
invasive culture, technologically, ecologically, militarily and through essentially
all other forms of dialectical systemisation. I am also repulsed by the positioning
of wild animals as invaders and a threat to living beings here, when cull-
practitioners are blocking the entrances and exits to setts, are out with guns amd
are putting cages near setts to capture living beings and annihilate them. The
other recent example of revolt inspiring conservationism is learning of the John
Muir Trust engaging in deer culling – something Muir would have been disgusted
by, with its conservationist non-preservationism.

The distinction between conservationism and preservationism, within
environmentalism, as practices has its roots in the disagreements between
Pinchot and Muir. Muir, who interviewed bears and considered the preservation
of forests to be defending God’s first temple [9], sought to affirm an intrinsic
value in the living world through his preservationism, with his desires being that
bears and forests would be left to live their lives without experiencing
interference from Leviathan. Pinchot’s conservationism, which was embraced by
the American political establishment and has sadly become the go-to rhetoric of
many environmentalists, sought to position instrumental (systemic/machinic)
value in some living beings, as being worth keeping (as property) for their
usefulness to Leviathan. The difference between these perspectives is largely the
difference between transcendentalism (Muir) and materialism (Pinchot).

In my book Feral Iconoclasm I articulated my rejection of materialism (as a dead
perspective), through an affirmation of hylozoic-physicalism, and don’t feel any
need to differentiate from materialism further, as it is clear that I am rejecting
the tendency. But while I do not embrace materialism (and conservationism), I
do not share entirely Muir’s perspective regarding preservationism, for its
transcendentalist qualities. Intrinsic value, God and transcendence to me are
spooks and phantasms. To differentiate from transcendentalism here I will use
the thoughts of two relevant transcendentalists, who have both inspired and
influenced my thought and practice.

The first of these is Henry David Thoreau, who stated -

“This is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as
indeed it always does, at last, with the universal. …. Faith, indeed, is all the reform
that is needed; it is itself a reform. When the sunshine falls on the path of the poet,
he enjoys all those pure benefits and pleasures which the arts slowly and partially
realize from age to age. … The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that
profit and happiness which their lagging inventions supply.” [10]

in his piece Paradise To Be Regained, and –

“Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the well which
the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I am always
surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to
the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a
quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them by a wide interval
from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets.”
[11]

in his most famous work, Walden. Thoreau’s affirmation of religious and
transcendent qualities of the living world is largely shared by his friend Ralph
Waldo Emerson, who, in his piece Nature states –

“Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all
things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves
are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or
behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth,
Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine,
or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in
which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of
everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call
Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit
hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as
the FATHER.”

and -

“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.
At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the
man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he
whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has
retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with
heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild
delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,—he is my
creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the
sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for
every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind,
from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally
well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible
virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have
enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a
man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is
always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a
decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not
how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason
and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity,
(leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—
my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean
egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the
currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers,
to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am
the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something
more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and
especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as
his own nature.” [12]

From the transcendental perspective, preservationism is God’s Cause as
explosive holism, as seen here in both Thoreau’s and Emerson’s writings, with
the intrinsic value being an essential, soul-like, quality that is appealed to.

How my preservationism differs is that I don’t experience badgers, or any other
species or individual, as being intrinsically valuable or being expressions of God’s
will. My preservationism is explosive holism reversed –implosive holism. Rather
than intrinsic value, I experience badgers as egoistically valuable/desirable, not
for instrumental value, but for the immediate joy of their presence in my world.
The reversed holism is subscendental, in that preservation isn’t a mode of
connecting to God through transcendence, but an experience of being-me, of
encountering my being and the world as extending from me and me from the
world, as an unending paradox. From this, badger preservationism is self-
preservationism, not a Cause, but an expression of egoistic-will-to-power/life – I
actualise my being through the practice of preservation. Subscendence, as I
encounter it, is individualising, rather than collectivising – in the same way that I
described earlier on species-being. I also want to note here that one of the key
differences between transcendental-preservationism and subscendental-
preservationism is the difference between spirituality and mystical-experience –
(transcendental-)spirituality being something bound to words and
(subscendental-)mystical experience being ineffable. There is an obvious
absurdity to any self-preservation, which my absurdism is happy to accept.

Anarchy!

Anarchy is here. Anarchy is now. I experience anarchy most intensely when
among the living, usually while surrounded by badger setts, trees and bird song,
but it is not separate from my body. My bodily presence is the ontological
actualisation of primal-anarchy – not as anthropological performance, but as the
free expression of my will.

The anarchy of my anti-cull rebellion is my refusal to accept systematisation, to
accept the systemic abuse of these living beings I encounter as egoistically
valuable. It is primal in two senses. The first of these senses is that it is not bound
to secondary or other mediatory “higher levels” of activity (rejecting that
hierarchy), which are bound to organisational practices. It is also primal in that it
is an expression of becoming-animal.

My anarchy is individualist and subscendentally-holist – psychic-nomadism as
being here, being nowhere, being-in-the-world and being-the-world. My anti-cull
rebellion is individualistic and subscends to affirm the lives of badgers as being
valuable to my self-preservation.

The Cull

Today it is really difficult, for me at least, to find a starting point to discussing the
cull – in a similar way that anti-cull practice is really difficult to find a place to
start with. It has been a few days since I last added to this piece and as I am sat
here I am unsure how to begin this section. I can say quite easily that I hate and
despise the cull with an intensity that I experience an immediate bodily reaction
while writing now. But from there it is less easy. I hear that crow cawing though
and wish to not give in out of weakness.

Last night I attended my first gig/concert since the pandemic and lockdowns
started over a year ago. The night was comprised of a lot of folk rock music,
fiddle playing and dancing, I saw more folky and crustie friends than I expected
to, and my legs are now very achy from all the dancing. Among the friends I saw
there were two who are active in radical rebellions, one an activist involved in
Extinction Rebellion and the other a hunt saboteur also engaged in anti-cull
rebellion. I was immediately intensely joyful to see both of them, after extended
periods of distance. I am starting my description of the cull here because I
encounter this experience of joyful affirmation of the living presence of other
individuals, particularly those with a conflictual relationship to this culture, as to
be an intense point of differentiation from the philosophy, practice and attitude
of cull-culture.

It takes very little research to affirm that badgers are being cull as a means for
the infrastructure of agro-politics to be seen as “doing something” to address
bovine TB, while actually doing nothing of the sort, as the disease is being spread
due to horrendous agricultural practices. Several years ago, I did some work
experience on a small free-range, organic, dairy farm, and I can remember the
farmer spitting venom about the cull, the horrendous practices and the farms
where TB was spreading, because the cows were being kept to close together
and the farmers were spreading TB infected muck across their fields. So I don’t
believe that the cull is a matter that is based in poor information or a lack of
information, and I’m not bringing here any information, facts, figures, or
knowledge, so as to present an analysis of the cull – I sincerely doubt such an
attempt would produce the desired result, in much the same way that statistics
regarding global warming don’t result in any response. The description of the
cull that follows from here is intentionally expressive, rather than attempting
factual-realism.

The cull is nothing short of a Man-ufacturing effort attempting to produce death,
through systematic-machinery, as a mode of anthropological-machinery that
seeks to exclude these living beings, called badgers by this culture, who do not
conform to the narratives of the Humanised Reality. Put more simply, it is a
systemic effort in mass killing, which is only not-comparable to genocidal war
efforts and the politics of ethnic-cleansing from a position of revolting
speciesism. As a dialectical-effort, the cull is seeking to negate the presence of
badgers, in the pursuit of Absolute-agricultural domination, as they are
positioned as an antithesis to the collective endeavour.

What else is the cull? The cull is a narrative of the production of mass-extinction.
The cull is lies and deceit and cowardice and a failure to affirm the failures of
farming-practices. The cull is state-apparatus and approved by the government.
The cull is practiced in the open, in a culture that keeps its doors closed.

How do I experience the cull? I experience the cull as right here and right now, as
it is happening where I live, today. I experience the cull when I go rambling
through woods and find cages close to setts. I experience the cull with a burning
hatred for its practice, feelings of disgust and detest, and a desire to revolt. I
experience the cull as an effort in erasing my ability to experience beautiful living
anarchic beings. I experience the cull as a Cause attempting to effect the negation
of badgers, which my egoism is revolted by and wants to see collapsed.

I am ending this piece of writing on my anti-cull philosophy here. My anti-cull
rebellion is not ended and will not end, even if the badger cull ends, as any and
all cull-practices are revolting to me. The logic of cull I reject. The machinery of
cull I detest. The culture of cull is horrendous and ultimately one of life-
renunciation, which I refuse to conform to. This will continue off of these pages,
as I journey through cull zones and within my being, as a primal experience of
life affirmation.

I long for a night with no cages to capture living beings.

Notes –
[1] Uncivilisation, 2014
[2] The Myth of Sisyphus, 2005
[3] https://ecorevoltblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/on-gorgias-
trilemma.pdf
[4] Feral Iconoclasm, 2018
[5] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/julian-langer-doomed-to-deferral
[6] Mesodma, 2019
[7] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/julian-langer-an-eco-egoist-
destruction-of-species-being-and-speciesism
[8] The Principle of Unrest, 2017
[9]
https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&conte
xt=jmb
[10] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/henry-david-thoreau-paradise-to-be-regained
[11] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/henry-david-thoreau-walden
[12] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ralph-waldo-emerson-nature